To: Phyllis Jackson From: Eric Greisen Date: "1 January 1994" Subject: Quarterly Report on AIPS (1993 Q4) The 15JUL93 release of "Classic AIPS" was made available only a little more than a month late. By the end of December, we had shipped the release to 94 institutions, 33 by magnetic tape (of 4 kinds) and 61 by electronic file copies. The improved installation procedures have generated complements from recipients of the system. The 15JAN94 release is also likely to be about a month late to allow us to complete and check some of the changes listed below. The ports of AIPS to DEC's Alpha computer (OSF/1 operating system) and HP's 9000/735 were cleaned up during the quarter using machines loaned to us by the vendors. A new port to personal computers (80386 and 80486 architectures) using the Linux (a public-domain UNIX, not DOS) operating system was developed and will be verified and released with the 15JAN94 release. Two new verbs were developed to help users find the desired function amongst the plethora of AIPS tasks and verbs. They are APROPOS to list all helps having user-specified word(s) in their 1-line descriptions and ABOUT to list all helps by category keywords. Programs to build and maintain the needed text files for these were also written. A new verb to switch between standard epochs in AIPS headers was written; RUN was enhanced to read files from anywhere; a new verb was written to allow long procedures to avoid running out of temporary space for literals; and the POPS verbs were rearranged to be more sensible and to make room for more new ones. The writing of end-of-files was speeded up for most magnetic tape applications and the deleting of print files was given a time delay to allow the print operation to occur first. A number of new tasks were written. They are: RFI to locate and report periods of interference; UVCRS to compare data from places in the uv plane where tracks cross; CCEDT to edit clean components tables based on flux and position; and TCOPY to copy tapes. During the quarter, FITLD, the task to translate VLBA data into AIPS, was enhanced to do data selection and file concatenation and to handle changing frequencies and misordered data. The VLB task to do baseline-oriented fringe fitting was given more user controls and numerous improvements in delay-rate space fitting. The holography task HOLGR was upgraded by Mike Kesteven. The data and model plotting task VBPLT was enhanced to plot autocorrelation data and its time averaging was corrected. The data concatenation task DBCON was changed to do frequency-dependent corrections for position offsets. All pseudo-array processor code was upgraded to allow "AP" memories in excess of 16 Megawords. The AIPS group lost most of the time from two of its core members on about December 1. Gustaaf van Moorsel was promoted to Head of Computing in Socorro and Bill Cotton is now concentrating his efforts on the VLA D-array survey and on a new education initiative. Although we received assistance from Jeff Uphoff in Charlottesville and Leonid Kogan in Socorro, the Classic AIPS group is now seriously understaffed. If the new budget will allow, we hope to correct this situation. File: /home/primate/egreisen/AIPS/reports/QRep93d.TXT